It's been awhile now, a few years, so this is more of fond memory than a source of shame.

We live in a small town, smaller still because there's not much commerce per capita here. The city has roughly 60,000 people, but you would not know it by the number of stores nor size of the downtown area.

One day I was driving away from the Uniplaza, something about a quarter the size of an American grocery store that our city calls a mall. In Uniplaza, there are several banks and I had just withdrawn some money. We pulled out to the side street, up to the traffic light when from behind me a man runs up to my open window yelling "Caja! Caja!". He was simply saying "box, box", but in such a way that it excited my already heightened sense of paranoia over the fact that I had what amounted to half a year of a Honduran's salary in my pocket. The light turned green and I gunned it.

We went downtown to a hardware store, but apparently this caja man had a truck and followed us in. He spoke to a man who was with me, explaining that they were the delivery company, Rapido Cargo, and they had a box that I had ordered. The man recognized us and our truck, when we were in town, from previous deliveries.

I can only imagine what caja guy told his drinking buddies that weekend. "If you want to see a gringo turn even more pale, just say the word caja."